Elizabeth F. Thompson is a historian of social movements and liberal constitutionalism in the Middle East, with a focus on how race and gender hierarchies have been reinforced by foreign intervention and the application of international law.  She recently published her third book:  How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Arab Congress and the Destruction of its Historic Liberal-Islamic Alliance  (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020).  It explores how and why Arabs gathered in Damascus after World War I to establish a democratic regime, in contrast to the prevalence of authoritarian-nationalist regimes established elsewhere in the lands of the defeated Ottoman and Habsburg Empires.  The book also considers the long-term, negative consequences of the destruction of the Arab democracy, authorized by the Paris Peace Conference and enforced by the new League of Nations.

Thompson is author of two previous books: Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Harvard, 2013) and Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (Columbia, 2000), which won two national prizes.   She is currently working on two new book projects.  “The Deluge: A Hungarian in Istanbul Survives the Destruction of Two Empires after World War I”  is based on the darkly humorous memoir of Antoine Köpe, who fought alongside Turks in the Great War only to find himself stateless afterward.  His family, which had prospered among Muslim Turks in the 19th century, found itself on the wrong side of the bloody and brutal new boundaries between Christian Europe and Muslim Middle East that were drawn after the Great War.   Her other project, “Gone With the Wind in Cairo,” explores the transnational politics of cinema and the renegotiation of racial and gender identities in 1940’s-50’s Middle East and the United States.

Thompson earned her doctorate in history from Columbia University in New York City.  She was previously Professor of History at the University of Virginia and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. She has held fellowship posts at the Library of Congress, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and been an Andrew Carnegie Fellow of the  Carnegie Corporation of New York.  With Mustafa Aksakal, she co-directed the National Endowment for Humanities’ Faculty Summer Seminar on World War I in the Middle East.